The neighbourhood cats are using my vegetable gardens as toilets.
A few weeks ago I dug Karen a beautiful little onion patch. Perfect square, with bricks around the edges to stop them from crumbling inwards. The following day, I visited it to inspect my handiwork, and discovered a suspicious circular wet patch in the middle.
Today, I’ve been in the garden mowing, strimming and weeding ((I neglected to clear up the sycamore seeds over the winter, so I’ve had to pull up hundreds of small sycamore trees so far, and there are still a few yet to go.)) However, as I approached my small pea section, I noticed a familiar odour.
I can’t see it, but I can definitely smell it.
One of the neighbourhood cats is using my pea patch as a pee patch.
15 replies on “Blood, Sweat and Toilet”
More reasons to hate cats. I like peas. Cats obviously don’t. Cats are bad. Have you tried mining the pea patch?
Not yet. The plants are still quite small. There won’t be peas until much later in the summer.
Cats and peas are almost equally lovely.
Time to load the pellet gun
Never mind cats, cats are fine, I want a garden! I want to have handiwork.
**Andre**: Would, but I like it when the cats come into my garden to be stroked, so I don’t want to deter them. I’d rather just electrify the soil or somesuch to keep them on the paths.
**Matt**: Consider an allotment. You can grow your own vegetables for the same fee per year as a week’s grocery shop. Of course, there’s a certain investment of time and energy required, but you’ll save money on a gym membership.
maybe you could hide in the rose bush [camouflaged by rose petals] and only shot the ones that pee.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I like the cats. All cats. I don’t want to deter the cats from visiting. Not a single one of them.
However, I do want to deter them from “visiting”, in the excretal sense of the word. Well, there is no excretal sense of the word, but use your imagination.
If there was an excretal sense of the word you would know all about it. Cat shit is the most foul-smelling substance known to modern scientists.
Allotments are not that common here in Ireland. Besides, it’s hard to have a garden party in an allotment, and discuss your planting and edging and genuses of flowers, etc.
Matt, you could take up knitting instead.
Unfortunately I lack the manual dexterity to knit and purl. I’m quite good at soldering 100-way multicores though, strangely. And I can sew on a button, properly. But that’s besides the point.
My problem with knitting is patience. I just don’t think that I can bring myself to add identical stitches one at a time to a garment until it was finished. When faced with a repetitive task, I generally can write a computer program to be able to perform the repetitive action for me. As a result, I have a very low tolerance for repetitive tasks that can’t be done on a computer.
Perhaps you would be more suited to a knitting machine then, Pete. Although that would be cheating.
Try spreading orange peels where you dont want the cats to go… They HATE the smell of orange peel for some reason… *Smile* Happy p-ing!!!!!! *Giggle*
Welcome, Gemmie.
Thanks for the advice. We’ve actually moved house since I wrote this entry, and we don’t have an onion patch anymore, but hopefully someone else will find your suggestion useful.